Experimental research projects are defined by one or several experiments which have to involve one to many time-related measurements in order to yield a consistent set of results, for instance by mere repetition, with or without changing one or several parameters or with different measurement instruments available.
It is customary to compare these experiments with set of experiments from several scientists and/or scientific institutions elaborated towards a similar goal.
Review of these set of experiments from several scientists, or related application reference material is necessary to validate or optimize and settle a definite norm and/or model and/or design from an experimental research project.
However, it is a time consuming step in the experimental research project process.
Consequently, scientists and scientific institutions have developed computer based systems and methods which provide capabilities for accessing a variety of research databases, each of which containing a wide range of information sources, such as scientific publications.
For example, the database may be a database storing the papers published in a Journal, in free or pay access.
With these types of databases, a scientist looking for specific information has to select a Journal for finding the relevant information. It may be sufficient when the information he wants is specific to one field of research. But, it is not always the case.
For example, when a researcher is looking for a solution to a specific problem, similar problems may have found a solution in other fields of research.
One understands that this type of databases gives few chances to access to this information.
Moreover, many fields of research nowadays combine several disciplines.
So, recently, diverse online databases have emerged to disseminate scientific information non-limited to a specific field of research.
Generally, the content of these databases is limited to information ever published such as papers, conferences, thesis and so on.
These types of databases may be in a restricted access, for example when they depend of a research organism, or in open access to any person. For example, we can cite the open archive known to HAL meaning Hyper Articles in Line or the open archive known to arXchive.
With these databases, a user has to enter keywords to find relevant information. These keywords are not inherently limited to a field of research so that the database may return more information than when its content is limited to a Journal.
However, there are a number of drawbacks to these online databases. While these databases serve well in their role as a search engine, they lack many other desirable functions.
For instance, the ability to determine the importance of a particular paper based upon its comparison with the user's project is absent from the current databases.
This creates difficulty in determining which papers not to read and which should receive high priority. The time estimated to read all the published literature in the given field of the user's project is too long.
Moreover, in this explosion of number and divergence of research fields, each field tends to generate its own appropriate terms and then languages.
This highlights some misunderstanding between researchers that makes complex any link between researchers of different fields and tend to their divergence.
Moreover, the industry, but also researchers, based only on published results may have sometimes difficulties to anticipate, sufficiently cadrable, future scientific and technological yet probable.
As the amount of scientific information disseminated grows, scientists need fast and efficient tools to quickly assimilate new information, integrate it with pre-existing information, and judge the relevance of said information relative to their own project.
Scientists also need tools to easily share information about current research. For example, in current computer-based systems or methods, the ability to analyze and discuss about the issues encountered in the formulation of an experimental protocol, the design of the experimental set-up or the relevance of experimental results with other researchers is absent.